Nicholas Spangler

I started at Newsday in 2010, working briefly as a general assignment reporter before covering Babylon Town, then Smithtown and its villages. Since 2023, I’ve been back where I started, on general assignment. Unlike many of my coworkers, I don’t have a coverage area. I might start a week listening to victim impact statements in a courtroom and finish the week writing about a new Alzheimer’s disease drug.

Some of this is utility work, feeding quotes or details to another reporter, and doing it quickly.

I might start a week listening to victim impact statements in a courtroom and finish writing about a new Alzheimer’s disease drug.

Sometimes I get a day or more to learn about my topic. Typically this involves reading previous stories by other reporters, researching online archives, interviewing subject experts and Long Islanders willing to make their lives, or at least parts of them, public record.

I relish and dread those stories. Relish, because I enjoy talking to most of my sources. Some of their interest and enthusiasm refracts to me. Dread because there usually comes a point, just as I start writing, when I doubt that I’ve talked to the right people, or enough people, or asked the right questions, or settled on the extent of context a reader will need to make sense of whatever it is I’m writing about.

This is my third full-time job. Before I started at Newsday, I wrote features for The Miami Herald and sports for the Southampton Press. Before that, I was a bike messenger in Manhattan. I worked at a tennis club in Amagansett most summers when I was a teenager.

I worked in Amagansett because I spent summers with my grandparents, who had summered in East Hampton since before I was born.

For the first 20 or so years of my life, Long Island was a place I only knew in the summer. I knew a small part of it: Little Albert’s Landing, where I sailed with my grandfather; the shop with the mechanical donut machine, where we biked mornings, and Georgica Beach, where I surfed with my friends. Most of the people I knew were, like us, only summer residents. The rest of Long Island was something through which I passed on the train to the East Hampton stop.

It took me years to realize just how small that summer life was and how much – race, class, government and taxes, for starters – it left out.